Research Machines Link 480Z

Peter Pachla wrote: I don't believe my school was that early, though COS rings a bell, so presumably that entire bootrom including Front Panel was called COS, even though we actually justed booted 31K (and later, 56K!) builds of CP/M. Our machines had twin disks. Later on, we bought two 480Zs (in black, to match) and a Memotech MTX512. At first, two maths teachers were conscripted into teaching 'O' level Computer Studies, which involved talking about core memory and learning BASIC. I first saw some core memory about three weeks ago when a colleague pulled some out of a cupboard, 20 years after I first heard about it. Perhaps it's time for another trip to the Science Museum. My school only taught Computer Studies for four years, because teaching about computers was quickly displaced by learning about computers in other subjects. Oddly enough, they were most enthusiastically employed by the History department, because one of the teachers was involved in the development of an archaeology program called DIG. CESIL, Computer Education in Schools Instructional Language. CESIL was hilarious. We had an interpreter for it, written in BASIC so that it ran many times more slowly than BASIC, despite looking like assembler, with instructions like JIZERO. I was straight back to BASIC or machine code (entered in the Front Panel) at lunchtimes. Absolutely. Our assembler only took 8080 mnemonics, so I continued using the Front Panel and DATA statements in BASIC.